How Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw

Until recently, Peter Steinberger was a developer working in relative obscurity. But in November 2025, he launched the viral AI agent platform OpenClaw. Within a few months, he was receiving a hero’s welcome at a San Francisco OpenClaw event where 1,300 people signed up for a 500-capacity space—a crowd that felt closer to one of Apple’s famously buzzy launches. The open-source platform allows users to create and manage personal AI agents, interacting with them through familiar messaging apps like iMessage or WhatsApp, much as they would a human assistant. But it all started organically and iteratively. As the artificial intelligence coding tools he relied on improved, Steinberger’s platform became more capable and ran more smoothly. He knew he was onto something, but getting people to understand it was another story. When Steinberger first shared his work with his 50,000 followers on X, the response was muted. “It almost felt like a challenge—why can’t I explain how awesome this is?” Steinberger says. When he showed friends what his agent could do—continuously work on complex tasks—they immediately wanted their own. Realizing that showing worked better than telling, Steinberger set up a public Discord group chat as a showcase for OpenClaw. “I just worked in public, and people could observe me improving my agent . . . and doing random things like automating my house and just showing people how good this thing is, even if you throw weird problems at it.” That’s when OpenClaw began to take off. Many early fans were AI researchers, but plenty were not. (One early user was a dentist.) “I thought a little bit about marketing, but I never imagined that it would go off like this,” he says. For users willing to give an AI agent access to files on their computer, OpenClaw offered an early taste of a humanlike assistant. People built small agent-run businesses; one user had an agent contact local dealerships to find the best price on a new truck. Others created research assistants, customer-support bots, and marketing pipelines. In February, Steinberger joined OpenAI, working across product teams, including Codex, to build agent and multiagent systems. OpenClaw remains an independent, open-source platform with roughly half a million systems around the world running it. But Steinberger will be the first to admit that whatever feels state of the art now has a short shelf life. “We are in weird times,” he says. “Things are progressing so fast.” This profile is part of Fast Company’s AI 20 for 2026, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AI’s most influential technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers. The extended deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Thursday, June 18, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.